Marine drilling for oil has expanded exponentially in recent decades, due to the technologically-facilitated accessibility to undersea reserves. However, with such drilling comes the risk of oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez incident that was a surface spill from a tanker, and the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, which occurred both at the surface and deep under the sea.
Oil spills cause mass amounts of environmental damage and it is extremely time consuming, expensive and generally difficult to clean up the mess left in their wake. Often oil spills occur in hostile environments such as the sea subject to storms or in the far north. Prior art oil spill technologies include adding dispersants to disperse the spill, containing the spill and burning the oil. In these cases, the oil is lost, which may result in a significant loss in addition to the cleanup costs.
In the past, the address oil spills authorities have sucked the oil/water mixture directly into trucks or barges, wherein the mixture contained 95% water and 5% oil, and either destroying the mixture reclaimed or separating the oil from the water offsite. This is very inefficient due to the high transportation costs. Further, barging and booming was commonly practiced by authorities; however the booms and the barges couldn't protect the coastline because oil spill constantly went overboard due to heavy blowing wind. As oil has monetary value, a recovery method is preferable to destruction of the oil that also leaves potentially toxic by-products in the environment.
The cleanup procedure becomes even more challenging when a supervisor has to be present at the spill site for the duration of the process. Further, some of the most skilled cleanup specialists are only available remotely.
There is therefore a need for an oil cleanup system which vacuums up the mixture of spilled oil and water, and separates the oil from the water for processing and resale, before returning the clean water to the sea. Further there is a need for such a system that may be operated remotely.
More and more, fixed oil platforms are being replaced by mobile oil platforms, connected to a subsea well by a flexible hose, which enables the platform to move with the water without becoming disconnected to the well. There are risks that the hose break or become disconnected underwater and leak oil into the sea. Prior art means of finding the hose break are limited to checking along the high structure over the well. The hose flow could be stopped at various checkpoints along the hose length, as well, so that parts of the hose could be replaced without the requirement of replacing the whole hose, however finding the broken hose end was still a problem.
Therefore, there is also a need for a means of retrieving a broken subsea hoses in order to minimize the spilling of oil into the sea.